Rex Simmonds tried to retire.

He even bought a house and a small yacht in Florida and spent a couple of winters there escaping the Atlantic Canadian cold.

It didn’t work. Ideas kept churning in his head.

“I guess I was bored,” he told SaltWire.

Last week Simmonds was on south side of St. John’s Harbour where the crew of his boat Patrick and William was unloading the last catch of crab for this season and putting the pots ashore.

Over the weekend the boat, owned by Simmonds’ company RS Marine was being prepared different work.

The 30-meter-long trawler headed out to sea again on June 18, fishing this time for information.

The boat and crew are on a 22-day mission to the Anticosti Islands, on a contract for Fugro and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) using hydrographic equipment to find areas where corals and sea sponges are growing.

While the Patrick and William was born as a fishing boat, these days its main purpose is ocean research, under contract to government, academia and private industry.

“We have a lot of technology on board that a lot of fishing vessels don’t, like a multi-beam sounder,” said Simmonds’ daughter Megan Murphy, who is business manager for the company.

“We outfitted the boat so we could do both, fishing and research,” she said, adding that decision opened them to a whole lot of extra business potential.

The contracts are varied, said Murphy.

Last year, the Patrick and William even played the role of a pirate ship, during a Department of National Defence exercise in Halifax to train navy personnel how to board an enemy ship.

The Anticosti work is just one of the jobs RS Marine has on the books for this year.

“We have five pieces of research work lined up this year and every single one is different,” she said.

The combination of fishing and research has enabled Simmonds to not only resume his life as a mariner but build a business for his family and their future.

It wasn’t hard to get Murphy and her family on board with the idea.

His daughter recounts it this way.

She and her husband were living in New Brunswick, with military careers and raising one-year-old twin boys, when her father came to them in 2018 with a business idea.

The Katrina Charlene, a 90-foot trawler owned by the Offshore Fish Harvesters Association, was up for sale.

He figured it would make an ideal boat to land research contracts, with some fishing to help subsidize operational costs.

There was just one thing in Simmonds’ way. The owners already had a formal purchase and sale agreement with another prospective buyer. Simmonds had to wait.

Two weeks later he learned the other offer was off the table.

With a cheque for $225,000 he made his down payment, closing the deal soon after.

One of the first things Simmonds did was change the name of the boat, renaming it after his twin grandsons Patrick and William.

After all, this was going to be a family business.

Murphy said it was a big decision to move back to Newfoundland from New Brunswick, but she and her husband didn’t really hesitate.

“We were completely secure in our government jobs and we had our house, our kids, everything there,” she said. “But we said, ‘Let’s do it’.”

Given her father's past ventures, they felt it was a good bet.

After all, this wasn’t Simmonds’ first sea trial.

After graduating high school in St. Anthony in 1980 at the age of 15, Simmonds joined his father in the family’s inshore fishing business.

Two years later, he was mate on the Fishery Products International gill-netter Zeta.

By the time he was 20 he had completed his Fishing Master II certification and in 1987 he signed on as captain of a longliner owner by another fish harvester.

In 1989 he was relieving mate for the Funk Island Banker, one of the middle-distance longliners owned by the province in a pilot project to fish the area between inshore and offshore. That project lasted just a couple of years before being cancelled.

The next year Simmonds was owner of his own boat, the 65-foot longliner Miss Jacqueline III.

His main fishery was cod and he was hunting the fish at the Virgin Rocks, a shoal spot on the Grand Banks, about 100 miles east of the Avalon Peninsula.

A year later he commissioned a shipyard at Glovertown, N.L., to build him a 65-foot steel longliner.

He took delivery of the Newfoundland Tradition in 1992, just four months after the federal government declared a moratorium on northern cod.

He was 28 years old with a $1.4 million debt and no cod to catch.

If he was worried at that time, he doesn’t recall it that way now.

“The way I looked at it everyone else was in the same boat, companies, government, fishermen; it wasn’t just Rex Simmonds,” he said.

The next year the federal government issued snow crab licences and Simmonds’ secured a licence for a large supplementary quota, fishing crab 100-200 miles offshore.

“Crab was the thing that kept us afloat,” he said.

Still, he knew he had to diversify further.

He pointed the Newfoundland Tradition towards the Davis Strait, near Greenland, fishing for turbot alongside foreign boats.

His relentless quest to improve operations and find new opportunities pushed the business further.

In 1996 he became the first inshore fish harvester to hold a processing-at-sea licence by adding freezing capacity to the Newfoundland Tradition.

With that equipment he was able to deliver higher-quality fish, and collect higher prices.

His innovative thinking also earned him a provincial government award for Innovator of the Year in the fishery in 1998.

In 2010 Simmonds traded the 65-foot steel longliner for a 90 foot factory freezer trawler, the Royal Venture, operating under the company name Ocean Seafood International Ltd.

In 2015 he sold the boat and the company to the Innu Nation.

He remained in the wheelhouse, however, under contract to the Innu Nation, operating the boat until the Innu Nation sold the boat in 2018.

Then he took a stab at retirment.

There’s a saying in Newfoundland and Labrador.

“You can take the boy out of the bay but you can’t take the bay out of the boy.”

Simmonds realized that soaking up the Florida sun and sailing without a purpose held no appeal.

He put “For Sale” signs on the house and yacht and headed back home to launch the new venture.

The first year was not exactly smooth sailing for RS Marine.

They landed just one research job, with Memorial University’s C-Core.

C-Core wanted to track icebergs using drones and side scan sonar, and to do that they needed to get scientists and technicians to sea to find the bergs. The Patrick and William was hired to get them there.

The boat was also under contract to the Miawpukek First Nation of Conne River to fish a quota of snow crab they held in the offshore, in zone 3NO.

But the landings in 2019 were dismal.

“We were hauling 50 to 100 pots to get 8,000 pounds,” said Simmonds.

Then, along came another challenge Simmonds could not have imagined.

COVID arrived and the global pandemic caused a financial tsunami with ripple effects for industries around the world.

At-sea fisheries research came to a halt and contracts disappeared.

Without vaccines to prevent the spread of disease, it was risky to have people living in close quarters on a ship.

The crab fishery also appeared to be in jeopardy.

With hotels and restaurants shut down, the traditional markets for shellfish were drying up. No one was certain whether there would even be a crab fishery.

The crab fishing season did go ahead, but the soft market resulted in a price drop of about 40 per cent.

Fortunately for the Patrick and William, crab catches in the offshore were much better in 2020.

Simmonds said they landed about 280,000 pounds that season, fishing 280 miles offshore, close to the edge of the continental shelf in 3N0.

Meanwhile, his daughter continued to devote her time to scouring government websites for tenders and connecting with potential clients to learn what they might need and how RS Marine might be able to help them.

The diligence is paying off.

In 2021, their contracts ranged from cleanup of abandoned mussel farms in Placentia and Trinity Bay and retrieval of ghost gear in the Labrador Sea to a sea cucumber survey on the St. Pierre Bank in zone 3Ps and a contract with the Atlantic Halibut Council to retrieve halibut tags in NAFO area 3N.

This year, said Simmonds, science and research contracts will make up more than half of their business.

He’s reluctant to say how much the work is worth, but revenue is seven figures.

“We’re at the point now where the Patrick and William could almost be dedicated just to research,” he said.

In his years as a mariner and fishing captain, Simmonds has faced many gales.

He’s seen his share of bad weather, along with uncertainty and financial challenges, and the never-ending collective wailing and gnashing of teeth within the industry.

Simmonds has taken it in stride, with a personal game plan that appears simple.

He says an investment in this business, like previous investments he made in the inshore and offshore fishing industry, is an investment in himself and his family.

For others in the fishing business, or any business for that matter, he has this advice, “Don’t base your business on just one year.

“And don’t spend the money from your business on four wheelers and big trucks. Make sure the business survives first and the money is put back into the boat because that’s what’s making you money. And if you don’t feed it, it won’t survive.”

And it's not just about investing money, he said, but in taking time to think outside the box, to ensure a quality product.

It’s as simple as how you handle the crab, he explained.

While the Patrick and William has a seawater tank system to hold live crab, for instance, when those tanks are full they have to store the excess on ice.

“I made some major changes in how we were handling it,” he said.

Instead of sending the crab into the hold via chutes, they started boxing it on deck and then loading the boxes into the hold.

The result is less damage to the crab.

“Dad has always been very perceptive, always ahead of the game,” Murphy told SaltWire.

It’s that quest for improvement that’s bringing innovation to the Patrick and William this year, a new energy-efficient propulsion system with a million-dollar price tag.

While funding from Environment Canada will cover a quarter of the costs, RS Marine will still have to cut a cheque for about $750,000.

The payoff, however, will be a more energy efficient vessel and lower annual fuel consumption.

That’s not the only investment they’re considering.

With so much research work on the books, Simmonds figures they soon won't have time to fish.

That’s why, two days after the Patrick and William headed out of St. John’s harbour last week, Simmonds was at St. John’s airport to catch a flight to the Netherlands.

He’s shopping for a new vessel.

Because if RS Marine continues to juggle fishing with ocean research, they’re going to need another boat.

About the Patrick and William

Ocean Research equipment on board:

Moving Vessel profiler for ocean bottom mapping

Wet and dry lab spaces for water sampling

Ability to outfit for data collection and live streaming

Crane aft for research and gear retrieval

2019 - Iceberg Tagging and Tracking

Patrick and William contracted by C-Core of Memorial University to charter a vessel of scientists and techs to deploy drones to place sensors on top of moving icebergs to track their path.

May - DFO sensor retrieval project for DFO off the Avalon Peninsula, NL, to determine migration routes of Atlantic salmon and their prevalence in areas of offshore oil and gas activities.

June – Five-day mission with Atlantic Halibut Council to retrieve Halibut tags in NAFO 3N.

August – Collaboration with Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services for cleanup of four abandoned mussel farms around the island, for the Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Association (NAIA)

September - Patrick and William participated in Exercise CUTLASS FURY 2021 (CF21), a joint, combined, and inter-agency exercise hosted by the Commander Maritime Forces Atlantic (MARLANT).

October -Chartered by DFO to conduct a sea cucumber ROV survey in two fishing areas on the St. Pierre Bank (3Ps).

October – Commissioned by the Torngat Secretariat to retrieve and return to shore lost fishing gear from the Labrador Sea in NAFO 2HJ.

December – Contracted for an eight-day mission to retrieve buoys for Miawpukek Horizon Maritime Services Ltd. in Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton.

March – Contracted by DFO to deploy acoustic transmitters in Greenland Halibut offshore in NAFO 2J3.

March – Eight-day mission for Dalhousie University to deploy buoys 30 miles off Cape Race to monitor Atlantic Salmon.

April – Contract for the Atlantic Halibut Council to transfer personnel from St. John’s, NL, to the OCI vessel Calvert in 3L.

April – Eight-day charter for DFO to recover scientific instruments and moorings near the Northeast Newfoundland Marine Refuge.

June – Eight-day mission for Dalhousie University to deploy buoys 30 miles off Cape Race to monitor Atlantic Salmon.

June – Partnered with Furgo to complete hydrographic surveys (mapping) of the seabed for DFO, using multibeam echosounders, in Anticosti Island, QC.

August - Chartered by DFO to bring department scientists and technicians out to the St. Pierre Bank (3Ps) to conduct a sea cucumber survey.

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